The present disclosure relates to an apparatus and method for controlling a ball or other sports type object throwing machine, such as a tennis ball machine.
Sports object throwing machines may be utilized to simulate some aspect of a particular sport for the purpose of practice. For example, simulation of an opponent by a tennis ball machine may permit a player to practice return skills. As another example, a baseball or softball pitcher can be simulated by a pitching machine to permit a batter to practice their batting skills. Alternatively, a baseball throwing machine can be used to simulate a hitter so that players can practice fielding skills.
However, heretofore in this field, the control of automatic sports object throwing machines such as tennis or baseball machines have been limited by either being too simplistic to provide a complete training experience or too complex to be easily usable. The methods of controlling such sports object throwing machines are varied. In some cases, few controls are supplied, requiring manual adjustments of the equipment by the user to manual adjust the equipment to provide the desired throwing characteristics such as position, speed, spin, etc. In other examples, complex computerized controls requiring substantial user programming are provided. Requiring a user to program the sports object throwing machine with complex inputs may reduce the user's satisfaction with the equipment due to the amount of set up time required. Furthermore, in some situations a user will not be capable of fully utilizing machine capacities if they are unable to adequately program such equipment.
Another consideration is that while simulating some aspect of a particular sport for the purpose of practicing the sport, such as tennis, it is desirable to not only throw the sports object in a particular way, but also to vary the distribution of successive throws to provide a more complete practice experience for the user. In this regard, some existing tennis ball machines provide means for distributing shots to different locations on the tennis court. One example of such a means is found in the LOBSTER ELITE TWO, produced by Lobster Sports, Inc., 7340 Fulton Ave, North Hollywood, Calif. 91605. This tennis ball machine utilizes horizontal and vertical oscillation functions to throw balls throughout the entire court area. However, such use of oscillation functions makes such equipment predictable to the user and thus may provide inadequate training of the skills related to reacting to and running down a ball shot to an unexpected location.
Another control means is found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,125,653 which provides a control wherein the stroke parameters including the impact point, the training level and the stroke type are loaded for every stroke one by one into the program memory. A user may then execute the stored program in a mixed manner by pressing a key. As previously discussed, requiring a user to program a controller in such a way may be time consuming. In addition, this method simply randomizes the various stroke parameters. Such randomization does not provide an accurate representation of actual shot distributions in a competitive tennis game where the majority of shots are likely to be located at deep center court, and thus simple randomization of shot location may not provide an optimum training experience.